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We, as technologists, can improve upon this by... We can do some of it but most of the 'do no evil' goes away in favor of what the money wants to do. Even wel

We, as technologists, can improve upon this by... We can do some of it but most of the 'do no evil' goes away in favor of what the money wants to do. Even well intentioned designers, developers/engineers, entrepreneurs, etc get pushed/pulled in directions of the money and usually understandably. The money machine always gets what it wants. A big problem with our society today is, the people with all the power (lever on the money) are the same ones selling us out to dystopian lack of control of privacy, rights etc. We are a system setup where the only good that can really come is if wealth, or someone wealthy, wants to see it happen. We are basing all our opportunities, hopes, rights on very few people that are actively getting paid to cut them down. Inequality does us in more than we realize because it is easy to throw the people under the bus for the money, once you are in the money you aren't in the people by design. We live in a 'free' country, but combine that with the feudal/sharecropper setup at our dictator-like controlled companies we work for where corporate rights overpower individual rights on the regular, and well you end up with a recipe for dystopia.

pdimitar 9y ago
Fully agreed. The grandparent comment expresses a beautiful sentiment -- and one that I and many other colleagues share -- but I've almost never seen it implemented in practice; and on the 2-3 occasions over a 15 years of career when I seen it, it was on a smaller scale and with business owners who had a close relationship with all technologists in the "company" (I use quotes here because an organization with 10 programmers, 1 sysadmin, 1 HR, 3 sales people and 1 CEO can hardly be called a "company"). Truth is, many businessmen don't think of people like people; they remind me a lot of the young military boys controlling drones that do the remote killing -- they think of people like "assets", "targets" and such. This de-humanization helps them make decisions that many of us would find extremely hard to justify in front of our moral values system.

pdimitar 9y ago

Fully agreed. The grandparent comment expresses a beautiful sentiment -- and one that I and many other colleagues share -- but I've almost never seen it implemented in practice; and on the 2-3 occasions over a 15 years of career when I seen it, it was on a smaller scale and with business owners who had a close relationship with all technologists in the "company" (I use quotes here because an organization with 10 programmers, 1 sysadmin, 1 HR, 3 sales people and 1 CEO can hardly be called a "company"). Truth is, many businessmen don't think of people like people; they remind me a lot of the young military boys controlling drones that do the remote killing -- they think of people like "assets", "targets" and such. This de-humanization helps them make decisions that many of us would find extremely hard to justify in front of our moral values system.